We’ve a brand new game going through playtesting ATM and we’ll be take a couple copies along to try and get some more feedback for from any willing victims!

We’ll be demoing Res Publica 2230AD all day. It’s a super trading and resource development game by Reiner Knizier, it supports three to five players from ages 10 and up and is a cracking blast.

We will also have Medieval Mastery on display, our game of tactical conquest based on the feudal system in medieval France. A game for 2 to 6 players aged 10 and up. Includes no silly co-op stuff, just smashing conflict!

Both games feature eye catching artwork by great artists and are exciting to play as well as being extremely well balanced.

Dragonmeet has masses to see and do all day from 10am til late. It’s being held this year at the Novotel hotel in Hammersmith, just at the end of the M4, so is dead easy to get to.

There will loads of exhibitors with bundles of demo games to try out and a big free play area to relax in and play your newly acquired games.

It’s great for your cos-play fix and there are giant sized exhibitions and drop in games all day long including games for lots of players. There are even miniature games tournaments and role play sessions that you can book into, mmmmm… Cthulhu!

Dragonmeet covers RPG’s, boardgames, card games, miniatures and book games, there are talks and signings by the industries best and brightest (yes, Steve Jackson will be there this year!) and much, much more.

Hope to see you there. Have a look and see all the groovy details here: http://www.dragonmeet.co.uk

Over the many years that we have attended the Expo it has gone from strength to strength and this year was no exception. The Hilton Hotel still held much of the Expo’s many and varied activities, the role-playing and other participation games, open gaming, play test zones, food court, and way too much more to list here. This year, for the first time, saw a separate trade hall that housed all of the exhibitors’ stands. This year’s Expo took place over three full days, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, three whole days of gaming to feed your geek! Bliss!

Situated in the NEC hall 1, a stones throw from the Hilton, the trade hall was gigantic. The extra space allowed for wider corridors and even though the footfall was expected to be much, much higher than before, it was so still much easier to wander around. The hall was light, airy and cool, which was great because the Expo enjoyed some proper summer weather, with blue skies and lashings of sunshine. As all of the exhibitors were in one place, and not spread about throughout the Hilton, it was much simpler to find the particular stands you just had to get to. The walkways even had street names emblazoned on them based on a stand that was to be found on that thoroughfare.

Chaos Publishing was very privileged to be able to share a stand with Mage Company and what a lovely stand Mage had put together. A large carpeted area fronted by a long counter with all the games for sale displayed along it and a really big gaming area with 16 tables for people to test out both Mage company’s and our own games. Even the colours of the carpet and tablecloths complimented each other, it looked lovely. We demonstrated Res Publica 2230AD, a new game that Chaos co-published with Mage Co., alongside Medieval Mastery and my! were we busy!

Res-Publica 2230AD, ready to go!

Setup was on Thursday this year because of the extra full day of trading. The hall opened at twelve and exhibitors were actually able to drive right in to unpack and set up. Although there was somewhat of a queue to access the hall at first, it was still a huge improvement on previous years. It was fabulous to meet all the guys and girls from Mage Co. and of course to meet Alex face to face for the first time. What a lovely bunch they all are, we had loads of fun working alongside them for the Expo and hopefully we’ve made some new friends too.

After unpacking and setting up the counter and demo tables we moved the car over to the hotel car park, booked Miles into the Hilton and headed off with our friend, Richard Scarsbrook of Chance and Counters games cafe in Bristol, to meet another friend, Andy Hopwood of Hopwood Games, and get some serious play testing in. Massive coffees were required and so some truly gigantic lattes were acquired from Costa, fantastic! Andy’s game was so good we lost track of time, those of us heading home overnight got there damn late! The atrocious roadworks on the M5 didn’t help and in fact were a nightmare the whole weekend. By Saturday night the longer cross-country route was decided on as a must do alternative.

On came the Expo proper. Miles covered the Press coverage and the opening, with the much appreciated assistance of Richard who stepped in to help out while David and Martin sat in traffic cursing and moaning. They eventually arrived to pitch straight in and give Miles and Richard a break for them to take in the ambience and to meet up with some of our games publishing compadres that were also exhibiting at the Expo this year.

Friday seemed busy enough with hoards of people making their way around the stands, many stopping to try out our games. However, in retrospect, Friday was actually relatively quiet. Saturday and Sunday were packed! It just goes to show how the gaming community has expanded over the last few years. Board games cafes seem to be springing up all over the place and many established games centres such as Firestorm games in Cardiff and Manaleak have moved to new, larger and nicer locations. All this seems to have driven the gaming industry along to make it what it is today, thriving.

Boy, were we busy!

So, on to Saturday and Sunday. Mark and Geli very kindly came along to help out both days, which was super of them and their help was really needed. Both days were a bustle of demoing and playing, even though actually sitting and playing a game when you’re needed to make up numbers takes a little while, it’s just so much fun to laugh your way though a game now and again, it’s as good as taking a break. Board games are great and that’s why we decided to make them!

The hours flew past on Saturday and before you knew it the trade hall was closing for the day. Then it was a mass migration over to the Hilton to take advantage of the excellent food court and more Role playing, mingling and board gaming until the small hours. Sunday was just as busy, the Mage Co. stand was full again most of the day, only quieting slightly about half an hour before the Expo sadly had to a to come to a close for another year.

The whole thing passed way too quickly as it always seems to do, but was such a fantastic experience. The new exhibitors’ venue in Hall 1 was excellent, well supported by vendors and had plenty of places to sit and relax. It’s close proximity to the Hilton didn’t detract at all from the convention, in fact, if anything, the delineation between the exhibition itself in the hall and gaming based at the Hilton seemed to enhance the whole. You kind of knew where you were and what you were doing there, much less confusing than having to figure out what was where and how to get there when it was all based at the Hilton alone.

So, in closing, a huge thank you to Mage Co. for having us join them and a big shout out to all our friends that help to make the board games community as great as it is. Fantastic to see you all at the Expo this year folks!

We will definitely be back again next year and we hope to see you there too!

And we’re really looking forward to it! The Expo is our favorite convention, it really is the event of the year for UK gamers. All types gamers are catered for, be it board, war, dice, larp or RP.

We love exhibiting our games of course and meeting up with all our compadres in the publishing biz. Of course taking some time off from the stand, trawling the halls and getting to play some new board games is a given. David also enjoys the RPG sessions too, Cthulhu and Pathfinder are his personal choices and Miles likes to help out with play testing when he can, playtest UK have tables in the main hall this year if you fancy trying out some unpublished games and maybe catch some gems in the making.

You can find Chaos Publishing at Mage Company’s stand this year, following our involvement in co-publishing Res Publica 2230AD with them and helping to bring it to the UK we’ll be sharing their stand demoing games.

Mage Company will have a lovely big stand in section A2, right by the main entrance. Please come along and have a look and even play a game or two with us.

If you love gaming make sure you don’t miss the UK Games Expo this year. it really is gamers paradise! The Expo takes place at the Birmingham NEC over the first weekend of June, from Friday the 3rd to Sunday the 5th. All the exhibitors are in hall one this year and games events are around the corner in The Hilton once again.

Everything you need to know can be found on the UK Games Expo website at http://www.ukgamesexpo.co.uk. See you there.

Next Unpub (Unpub 5) will be definately be towards the end of June. Either the third or last weekend depending on clashes (the 18th,19th, 25th or the 26th). Please let us know if you can think of anything happening on those weekends and we shall have a check around as well.

If you yourself won’t be able to come on either of those weekends then please mention it, we want the maximum possible number of designers that we can get.

Designed a game and need to test it. Email [email protected] beforehand and we’ll create a play schedule to get the max plays out of the day. Include play length, no. of players (min to max) and complexity (simple, moderate or hard). That should allow us to arrange things nicely.

There will be lunch, something easy like Oasis soup (you get a roll with it), chilli, curry or pasta and vege’s/vegans will be catered for. Munchies too, I very much expect :). If you’d like to add to the munchies pile please do bring some along, yum. If you’re intolerant please let us know, I’ll avoid nuts of course but please let me have tips for avoiding gluten in main dishes.

We’ll put the event page together once we’ve had a bit of feedback, lets say three to four days and finalise the date,food choice and location, which will be the Sutton Benger village hall for over 20, Dave’s place opposite the hall for less.

Chaos Publishing is proud to announce that our games are available to buy from Amazon and also Res Publica 2230 AD should now be available to buy at games stores across the uk.

Medieval Mastery and Res Publica 2230 AD are listed on Amazon market place and are really easy to find with a simple search.

If you are an Amazon Prime member you can benefit from free delivery and get next day delivery on both of the games.

Res Publica 2230 AD is available for £17.99 and Medieval Mastery for £23.99 so even if you aren’t a prime member and have to pay for delivery, don’t fret, Amazon’s shipping rates are good.

Res Publica 2230 AD has also been picked up by Esdevium, which is fabulous news as Esdevium supply retail outlets all across the UK, you should be able to pop in pick up a copy from your local games store.

Over the past few months and, in fact, since releasing the first edition of Medieval Mastery back in June 2011 at the UK Games Expo, we’ve constantly been learning and re-evaluating our role within the industry and have gained so much experience about games design, publishing and the industry. We have met so many fantastic people along the way. It’s been absolutely incredible to see the growth of the industry over the past few years and to be a part of the golden age of gaming that we see today.

Our Past

We released the 2nd Edition of Medieval Mastery at Essen 2012, the support we received was phenomenal although we very much realised that we still had so much to learn. Since then, weI’ve been pretty much buried in books, playing games, meeting people, asking questions and working on new game designs that we could later bring to market. After all the researching into what truly makes a great game for us, we arrived at our next game, one that we could truly be proud of…Brave the Elements. We put so many hours into the game’s development, there’s no way we could count it all. We definitely took our time and had the mechanics of game just about finalised by February 2014. Because of this, we knew we had something special we could take to print so we started preparing the artwork, graphic design, rule book, backstory, etc.

There was one problem however, we didn’t have all the money we needed to take the game into production. Still, we had been following Kickstarter for along time so made plans to setup a Kickstarter project for the game as soon as we had it ready, with enough artwork to show. Things were looking up although, as I had been focusing so much on the game itself and the appearance of the final product, taking on all graphic design responsibilities and art direction, there was not enough time I devoted into interacting with you (our audience) or marketing the project. By the time we had the project page prepared, the graphic design done and the first pieces of art underway, we believed we were ready to launch May 2014. We had prototype copies in the hands of reviewers, press releases being sent, updates regularly being posted on our social media. Everything seemed to be looking good…

The Kickstarter project page turned out well, we received a great deal of fantastic feedback for Brave the Elements and the art was looking amazing. The first couple of days were really exciting as our backers came flooding in from around the world. Looking at the numbers though, we knew almost straightaway how the campaign would turn out. Still we kept positive. More amazing reviews came in priding the game’s design and playability, confirming our belief in the game but still, at around the halfway point into the campaign while preparing for the UK Games Expo, we decided it was best to think about ending the Kickstarter campaign. What has stayed with us however was how much people enjoyed playing Brave the Elements. We know Brave the Elements is a game worth releasing, the feedback we’ve received confirms that so we will be re-launching but this time with the art and design complete and a massive marketing campaign. Keep an eye out for more news on that as it develops.

Our Future

Now, fast-forwarding to the present, we’ve had another quiet period where we’ve been reflecting on the future of Chaos Publishing and our plans going forward. With this post, I wish to reignite our spark and nurture it into a large, bright burning flame. We have a message that “we are here to stay and are here to create our mark within this incredible industry and this thriving community”. This is not about us, this about you and we are nothing without your support. So what are our plans? How do we aim to bring value to the hobby?

We will nurture the game design community! Our role going forward will be as a fully-fledged games publisher. Our goal is to bring great games to market that can create a lasting impression. However, we are not the only publisher/designers in the world so we wish to offer our support to others by creating and encouraging fantastic opportunities for designers to get their games published, whether it be by us or another publisher. We will help game designers from around the world develop their games and their game design ability so that their games are the very best they can be. Here are just a few things we will do to help:

The Chaos Vanguard: We are opening signups for any groups that are interested in playtesting unpublished prototypes. How does it work? There will be two sign-up forms (coming soon), one for playtest groups and one for game submissions from designers. If you are signing up as playtest group, we’ll ask you for your contact details and preferences for games that you would like to playtest. You can set your preferences by game mechanics, playing time, audience, complexity, number of players, etc. When we get a game submission from a designer that matches your preferences (and think it’ll interest your group), we’ll send you a message. It’s as simple as that. If you are submitting one (or more) of your games as designer, we’ll ask you for that same criteria and will get you in touch with quality playtesters that will play your game and offer you genuine feedback to help improve it for the future. All games submissions will be checked and will only be sent to matching playtest groups if all the information is complete. Your contact details will not be passed on or used for any other purposes outside of the Chaos Vanguard.

Chaos Unpub: An event we hope to run on a quarterly basis here in the UK, in Chippenham area. We invite game designers, publishers, and playtesters from across the country to attend and playtest each others unpublished prototypes. These events are completely FREE and we hope get as many as 80 people to attend, the venue has plenty of parking spaces and food will be made available throughout the day. These will be one day events run on a Saturday from 11am to 7pm although, if there is enough demand, we may extend the hours and/or make these full weekend events.

Chaos Design Contest: Although all of our games so far have been ones of our own design, we very much want to focus our attention on being a publisher and, as such, welcome game submissions from designers around the world. Please see our updated submissions policy here. Then again, that does not mean we don’t still have ideas for games that we would like to produce (…in fact, we have too many to keep track of). This is where the Chaos Design Contest comes in. We’ll set a brief and pitch it to the game design community, there will be specific deadlines and after receiving all the submissions we’ll evaluate which design we think is the best. As long as we believe the chosen game has promise and the designer agrees, we will then work to produce a fully developed version of the game with the intent to publish. We are really excited about this and hope to eventually have the contest up and running on a quarterly basis…

…wait…running on a quarterly basis…does that mean we’ll be publishing 4 or more new games each year? The short answer here is “Yes!” or at least we certainly hope so. From 2016, we will aim to follow a release schedule that has us producing at least one new game each quarter. This will of course depend on a lot but, to establish ourselves in this industry, we need to keep bringing out fantastic games that will engage and inspire. We will only be able to do this with your support.

Ok, that already seems like quite a lot to be thinking about but I can assure you there’s more:

We are going to be extremely proactive online, regularly engaging with social media. We will continue to keep you (our audience) up-to-date with all our happenings on a weekly basis through our website, which will all be summarised in our monthly newsletter. I shall instigate a number of discussion groups, forums and other projects to try and promote design and game development as well as invigorate the gaming community itself. Here are a few ways how:

Gaming News (Mondays): There’s a lot of great website out there devoted to the latest and greatest news in the gaming industry so, here, I don’t want to elaborate too much. As such, my goal here is to call attention to a few games, articles, events, etc. that really catch my attention that week and think you would like to hear about.

Designers’ Talk (Wednesdays): We truly believe in the game design community and making games better. In this segment, we’ll be inviting game designers to write out their thoughts on a particular aspect of game design and share it with the community. Here we encourage a lot of open communication between game designers. Our hope and our goal here is to bring the game design community closer together, sharing advice and experiences so others can learn and be inspired.

Chaos Blog, Announcements and Press Releases (Fridays): If you believe in what we do and the games we produce, you’ll definitely want to keep up-to-date with our project releases. In this segment, we’ll also update you with anything that’s happened here at Chaos Publishing the past week; ideas we’ve had, events we’ve been to, games played recently and our thoughts for the future. Our goal here is to create and maintain a constant channel of communication between you and us, providing you the best opportunity to help shape our future.

Chaos Publishing Podcast (Saturdays, Bi-weekly): For this podcast, I’ll be inviting an industry guest to join me on the show to talk about how they look at games, the design/development process, selection for publication, publication process, what they find sells and what doesn’t, and more. I’ve bee wanting to get this up and running for a while and am really excited about finally getting this series going.

Ok, that’s it for now. As you can see this will all be a lot work to keep up but we’re hoping to take Chaos Publishing to the next level and I’m utterly thrilled about what we have in store for the future, I really hope you decide to join us on our journey.